will xp run on a 166mhz proc.?

hi. my grandmother has an old gateway p5-166 with 256 mb ram i put a 40 gig h.d. in it
will windows professional sp1 work on this piece of junk? the processor is only 166mhz.
thanks in advance,
jason

 

Microsoft's minimum XP requirements is a 233, and recommends at least a 300. Technically, XP can be installed XP on a 166. I don't see the 256 RAM compensating for the slow processor though. I think it would be sluggish. Would Grandma think so? I do. XP can be installed on a 166 but will may be too slow even with 256 RAM. I suppose you could try, it's only one hour, and see how she feels if there is no other option. Three options that pop to mind are installing from an old Win98 CD, transferring the 40GB HD and 256 RAM to a new box, or even Linux.

Yeah I'd put Linux on there and I'm not crazy...(I'm not?)

Assuming she just wants email, internet, a word processor, something simple like that, Grandma will not know the difference. It's like TIVO. It runs on Linux, my sister has no idea, because it's a simple (not general purpose) machine. I would never recommend she run Linux on her personal computer. But for my Grandma, if she just needed email, internet and a word processor, maybe some picture viewer also, and I only had a P166 that couldn't be upgraded for whatever reason, Linux would absolutely do if setup properly. I digressed. Sorry! Had to get that off my chest for some reason (This paragraph had nothing in particular to do with any Major Geek members or you Mindset) Maybe I'm defensive about Linux, I think it's great, but I'm no preacher so sorry bout that.

 

hey thanks i will try xp first since i have it here if that dont work i will look in to linux
ive never used linux so im a little curious to check it out. thanks again, jason

 

You may be able to find a cheap pin compatible CPU, that will replace the P5-166. LIke a P5-300, P5-400 etc., that will add get up and go to grannies PC. Enough for XP, I imagine. Add more RAM, if you can, and you should get away with it. Bazza

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This guy loaded it onto a P-180 with 64MB of RAM & claims it 'runs fine':

http://www.emulators.com/secrets.htm#KeepTuned

Not sure what his definition of 'fine' might be. I loaded XP w/SP2 onto my old P-233 w/128MB RAM a couple of weeks ago, to test my new slipstreamed XP SP2 CD. It installed fine, but even after turning off a lot of non-essential services & choosing the 'adjust for best performance' option, it was still painfully slow. Just opening IE was a 20-30 second process at a minimum. Any kind of Macromedia flash on webpages crawled along. Once I loaded Avast! for anti-virus (thinking it might not be as intensive as Norton)...forget about it! Took about 5 minutes to finish booting everytime I started it up.

I decided to kill that experiment & reloaded good ol' Win98SE onto it...runs like a charm now! In the end, I recommend installing the matching OS for whatever 'era' your computer belongs.